Oh, did we mention that you've got five bucks and a butter knife to your name?

Strange though it may seem, the king has sent you on the most important quest the world has ever known, and he expects you to pay your own way. Oh, he might invite you to scrounge around the castle for any treasure chests you can get to (forget the ones with locks or behind locked doors), all probably containing enough loot to buy a pointy stick; but it wouldn't even occur to him that, what with the world hanging in the balance, it might be a good idea to give you every resource at his disposal. No Supernatural Aid for you!

Nor are you bringing much to the situation; Warriors of Destiny don't have trust funds. Or savings accounts. Or bus fare, for that matter. You'd think that just to qualify as a Warrior of Anything, you'd at least have a sword, maybe a suit of well-worn armor from all that warrioring you did to build up your reputation, but no. In fact, you're a Level 1 warrior, so you don't even have any experience to speak of — though the king is hardly going to suggest sending you off to boot camp with his personal guard for a week.

Examples:

In the second episode (the RPG parody) of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi king-Papan charges Sasshi and Arumi with defeating the dark lord, Aki-nee. The king gives them a bag of gold, then the court turns around and goes back into the castle again.

Done even more brutally in full-on RPG parody series Magical Circle Guru-Guru when the king loudly disavows himself of all responsibility for the child heroes after giving them a small amount of gold.

Played with in Bikini Warriors, where the king who is trying to send the heroines on a quest only gives them 10 gold to work with. The heroines try to convince the king to supply them better, ending with Dark Elf giving an ultimatum to decide between his kingdom or his money. He winds up throwing the heroines in the dungeon, naked and tied up with ropes.

Luffy from One Piece starts off his adventure on the high-seas with nothing but his clothes, a devil-fruit power (which prevents him from swimming) and a dinghy. And on top of his lack of material supplies, about the only thing he really knows how to do is fight so he can't even navigate.

In Dragon Ball, Goku begins the quest for the Dragon Balls in the Red Ribbon arc with nothing but a magical cloud, an extending stick and some martial arts skills. With them, he wipes out the entire Red Ribbon Army at the end of the story. He's in a similar situation at the start of the King Piccolo arc (a villain who can blow up cities all by himself), only this time he quickly loses the cloud!

Comic Books

Stanley and His Monster: Played with in the Phil Foglio mini-series. Ambrose Bierce tells Stanley to pack 'whatever he thinks he will need' for an expedition to Hell, while casting a spell that ensures that whatever he chooses will be exactly what he needs. Stanley packs a Halloween mask, a bottle of soda, a package of hot dogs, an umbrella, a bottle of barbeque sauce and a little red wagon. This turns out to be exactly what he needs to defeat the forces of Hell.

Comic Strips

One issue of Hsu and Chan has Arnie as a parody of Master Chief from Halo save the world from the covenant with a plastic serrated knife.

Films — Live-Action

Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Trope Namer: King Arthur and Sir Bedevere are forced to go and find a shrubbery by the deadly Knights Who Say Ni — "Those who hear them seldom live to tell the tale!". After recovering a shrubbery from Roger the Shrubber, the Knights Who Until Very Recently Said Ni ask them to find another shrubbery, and challenge them to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest, wiiiiiiith... A Herring! Arthur decides that this is silly and, upon learning that the word "it" hurts the Knights' ears, bypasses them entirely.

A few of the weapons randomly distributed at the beginning of Battle Royale (for which the point is to be the last one alive on the island) include a pot lid, binoculars, a paper fan, a megaphone and boxing gloves. Two end up useful, one ends up getting the owner killed, and the other two are used for one-off dark jokes.

Two of the characters facing down bloodthirsty aliens with future tech in Predators are armed with a scalpel and a prison shiv. This is actually justified, however, as everyone grabbed by the Predators comes equipped with the weaponry they are most familiar with. Whether or not that weaponry is practical for combating Predators. So when everyone else draws their guns (including a custom assault rifle, a sniper rifle, dual nickel-plated pistols, and even a freaking minigun, this one guy looks down at his shiv, and laments at length the fact that he has no gun.

The World's End is about 5 friends taking on an alien invasion and trying to save humanity, while completely drunk and with no idea what's going on.

Similarly played for laughs in Shaun of the Dead, where the protagonists take on zombies with cricket bats, tennis racquets, pool cues, patio furniture, and - for no real reason other than Rule of Funny - some of the hero's record collection. "The Batman soundtrack?" "Throw it."

At the start of Enemy at the Gates, the protagonist is one of the unlucky ones handed bullets (and only bullets) instead of a rifle before facing an enemy onslaught. "The One with the rifle shoots! The one with the bullets follows him! When the one with the rifle gets shot, the one with the bullets picks up the rifle and shoots!" The man in front of him doesn't need his for very long though. Actually a reversal of the real situation in Stalingrad at the time, where there were weapons aplenty,note the weapons, unlike the soldiers, tended to survive the charges but not usually anywhere near enough ammunition for them.

Twilight Sparkle: I've been thinking about that a while. That having a few soldiers along for a dangerous mission might be a good idea. At least since, you know, that one time you sent me and five other teenage mares up a mountain to evict a giant firebreathing dragon. Or when you sent us out alone to face Discord. Or that time—-

Celestia: You were in no danger from that dragon—

Twilight Sparkle: NO DANGER? That dragon nearly had hickory smoked pony for a bedtime snack!!

Experienced by the four at the beginning of The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. They're brought back to C'hou and (eventually) told they're there to help save the world, but all they have to live on initially is Ringo's pouchful of money—which turns out to be worth a LOT less than it used to, meaning they have to start finding money just to stay alive pretty damn quick. Rather shabby treatment for champions brought over by the gods....

Done in the novel Heroes Adrift by Moira J. Moore. The hero and heroine are professional weather-tamers (organization known as the Triple S) and live on a continent where the weather frequently tries to kill you. All Triple S employees live off the largesse of the government and have free housing provided for them, and they never have to pay for food, clothing, etc—they just walk up with their professional identification and get what they want. The queen sends the two of them to another continent to do a secret job for her. On this continent, weather-tamers aren't needed and the Queen's dictates are pretty much ignored... leaving the hero and heroine stranded with no money and no job skills in order to make money.

According to the author, that was actually the main point of writing the story:

Dick: How much is a key to a bus locker worth? One day it's worth 25 cents, the next day thousands of dollars. In this story I got to thinking that there are times in our lives when having a dime to make a phone call spells the difference between life and death. Keys, small change, maybe a theater ticket — how about a parking receipt for a Jaguar? All I had to do was link this idea up with time travel to see how the small and useless, under the wise eyes of a time traveler, might signify a great deal more. He would know when that dime might save your life. And, back in the past again, he might prefer that dime to any amount of money, no matter how large.

Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

Cord: Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff? Erasmas: Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.

Rick Riordan's The Heroes of Olympus: The only formal aid the Roman Senate gives Percy, Frank, and Hazel on their quest to save Camp Jupiter in Son Of Neptune is the piece-of-crap dinghy that sinks outside of Seattle. And that alone took a lot of begging.

Live-Action TV

The two-man British improv show S&M did a skit once where the Yoda-like mentor (Mike McShane) was preparing the local Skywalker-surrogate (Tony Slattery) for battle against the Big Bad. As Tony prepares to leave: "Do I get a lightsaber?" "No, just one of these naff sticks," handing him the flimsy prop cane he's holding.

In Brimstone, Ezekiel Stone is charged with tracking down 113 damned souls who've escaped to Earth, some of whom have been in Hell since the beginning of time, and who thus have amassed fantastic powers. To accomplish this mission, he has a handgun and $36.27 (the money on him when he died and went to Hell). Mind you, he begins each day with it, giving him functionally unlimited funds. $36.27 at a time. No saving up.

Reaper: The Devil provides Sam with an object capable of retrieving the escaped souls, such as a dust buster or a tennis ball. Funnily enough these are sometimes quite effective. The bad ones are when he gets given seemingly useful ones like a spear — to fight a Mongol warrior with. Or a boxing glove when facing a champion prizefighter.

He also sometimes gets strange powers to catch a particular soul. Of course, these usually end up completely useless and only serve as obstacles. Try catching a soul when anything you try to eat (even toothpaste) turns into an insect.

MST3K - in the "The Day the Earth Froze" episode, the evil witch challenges the hero to plow a field of snakes - when he challenges her on this point she replies "Hey, I'm the curse boss here!" In the actual movie she's deliberately wasting his time.

Tabletop Games

Most Tabletop RPG setups avoid this: Dungeons & Dragons (depending on the campaign and generousness of your DM, of course) gives you at least enough starting gear to do your job — things like a decent set of armour and a good weapon for the fighter, or a mostly-stocked spellbook for a wizard, or the clothes on your back for a monk. That said, it usually takes leveling to about level 4-ish to grind enough gold to buy magic items (or be able to take on enemy encounters that would drop magic items), but that's less this trope and more the inflation brought about by every adventurer and their brother swimming in treasure.

Fifth edition averts this trope entirely by attacking it from the other end: there is only one item in the game that is actually necessary for the full use of a character combat ability: the wizard's spellbook. Every other combat ability in the game is either entirely innate or can be applied at only a slightly reduced power level to improvised or trivially-obtained weapons, and full-strength gear is cheap on the level of standard adventuring profits covering a near-full replacement even at level one. Out of combat abilities such as lock-picking still require tools, but the skill required to use the tools can also be used to craft replacements on the fly in a pinch and inferior materials rarely levy a mechanical penalty on them either. Even losing your armor entirely doesn't shift your defenses enough to be a crippling loss... even for fighters.

d20 Modern, a game that uses D&D's basic system but in a modern-day setting, avoids this trope like the plague. It's perfectly reasonable and doable to set up a first level party decked out in the best non-magical equipment you can find. However, d20 modern is less reliant on your equipment than some tabletop games.

Spycraft breaks from the "gather loot and save" setup in favor of "get stuff from quartermaster depending on mission": a low-level mission will give you a mundane 9mm pistol, and as things get worse you can ask for Uzis, AK-47s, Browning Automatic Rifles, and if the world is really going to hell, an M2HB heavymachinegun.

Paranoia, of course, doesn't merely use this trope, it practically embodies it. Almost every piece of equipment given is not only useless for its intended purpose, but is guaranteed to be the cause of death of at least one player character. Thankfully, there's a reason for this.

Paranoia does something even worse: It's actually not that odd to get equipment assigned to you. Lots of equipment. Tons of it. Things you don't need, even. But one small detail: You're responsible for all the equipment given to you and are expected to return it in the same condition you were given it. Yes that includes grenades. This being Paranoia, it hardly needs saying that a failure to do so is treason. Or bringing it back in perfect condition is treason, as you failed to use your resources appropriately. Or both: you get accused of treason for failing to bring one thing back in mint condition and for failing to use your resources appropriately. Even if, logically, you had no way of knowing that you could set things on fire by pouring the latest version of Bouncy Bubble Beverage on them—or that this was what Friend Computer (or your superiors, who probably do want you dead) wanted, instead of you using your zap-gun or, y'know, a grenade. Never underestimate the ways you can get killed and/or accused of treason in Paranoia.

And that's not even getting into the equipment you might get from R&D. Not only does it have to be returned in mint condition, you need to use it at least once during the mission and file a report on it afterwards. You don't have security clearance for the instructions. You might not have security clearance to know what it does. And it has a tendency to malfunction even more often than your regular equipment.

Exalted makes this potentially Crazy Awesome, however, in that there is a Charm (character power) that would potentially allow a character to block a thrown mountain, with a butter knife. And a combat-focused character can take this power at starting level. Needless to say, the butter knife would not survive. Also completely averted through purchasable backgrounds. High levels of Command and Arsenal allow you to start the game with an army of 10,000 men outfitted with the finest mundane equipment available. Pool points with the rest of the party and you can outfit a squadron of 20 foot tall Magitek robots.

GURPS is, as usual, flexible: you generally get a reasonable set of starting cash, you can use an equipment list to buy any items your DM agrees are available, and you can even have a regular income (assuming your character actually has a job and attends to it regularly...) But you can get better starting funds as an Advantage by spending character points, or get extra character points by taking poverty as a Disadvantage.

All of your units come with only baseline equipment. Named characters avert this, usually with special powerful equipment exclusive to them or a combination of equipment that stock characters cannot take. It's still this trope though, because you can literally field a unit of elite vanguard units armed with stuff most bread and butter troops wouldn't be caught dead with (and in most cases, it works because the points are better allocated elsewhere).

The Warhammer 40,000 role playing games vary this. Death Watch starts you and your battle brothers with gear that is decent - for a value of "decent" that 99% of the Imperium's armed forces would lie, steal and murder for. Rogue Trader also averts this - the question is not whether you can afford a Lasgun, but whether you can afford ten thousand of them for your household troops (and the answer is usually "Sure, take it out of the petty cash!"). Dark Heresy was a bit worse about this, since the franchise was only slowly breaking away from traditional adventurer group rpgs and finding its own stride - thus, the agents of the most powerful organization of the Imperium are often equipped with the herring. In that case it often overlaps with On-Site Procurement; you're supposed to be low-key investigators after all, if they wanted to go in heavy they would have sent one of their many military forces. Only War finally usually averts this, but also occasionally indulges the trope: The players can first build their regiment which gives them a good set of standard equipment useful for their troop type. Then comes the logistics roll that determines whether the Departmento Munitorum assigns you 20 kg of explosives for the sabotage mission... or 20 crates of Ogryn dress uniforms.

The Iron Warriors suffered an in-universe case of this that contributed to their fall to Chaos. Despite being specialized in taking defensive fortifications rather than building them, they were tasked with holding worlds with ever-decreasing numbers, in one case a single squad assigned to watch over an entire planet.

Averted by Ironclaw, since there's not really anything in the way of magical equipment in the setting, and most players can easily start with decent equipment for their class. This is because in the first edition, equipment optimization was determined by weight, and in second edition, classes came with a core set of starting equipment (so a noble class character would always have a good-quality outfit and a rapier, for instance).

Being based on the first Final Fantasy game, the webcomic justifies and parodies this by the king simply being a total jerkass and maniac who gives the party nothing to save his daughter and the only thing they get for saving her is a bridge built... that he was making anyway and named after himself. Also, directly referenced in this comic, where it's apparently irrelevant as the weapons in the town all suck for some reason.

Speaking of, after Sarda depowered them and later imploded from Phlebotinum Overload, the gang has to face up to taking Chaos out. They have to do this in twenty-four hours to avert Chaos' plot to destroy the world (which likely involves a Time Crash); needless to say, they're having a bit of trouble getting their act together after faffing about and ruining civilization up to this point.

Averted in Tales of the Questor. Although the organization forcing Quentyn, the titular Questor, to go on his virtually impossible mission give him literally nothing at all, his fellow villagers (who he is going on his mission FOR) equip him to their level best ability — food, clothing, equipment, weapons, even an airship. Furthermore, a team of engineering students, sent by a school intrigued by Quentyn's expedition, come to make improvements to the airship and his other equipment.

"The Darned Good Reason rule. As in 'nobody becomes an adventurer without a darned good reason to think they'll survive it'." That and I got tired of Fred needing to write up a new character twice a session.

Defied by Digger. Murai plans to travel with only a begging bowl, trusting her god to provide for her.

Digger: Yeah. Okay. See, what I think you're failing to grasp is that your god did provide, and what he did provide was me. So you're going to corner whatever passes for a quartermaster in this joint, and you're going to get a blanket, a first aid kit, and a couple of pounds of trail mix, got it? And a knife. And tinder and flint. And I suppose it's too much to ask that anybody's heard of crampons around here...

In Toonami: Endgame, TOM kills the pirate that destroyed the Absolution and kidnapped SARA, with a fork.

Tower of God: Baam takes the test given by Headon with just a cleaver. Thankfully, Yuri enters onto his face and she and Evan give him an A-grade pocket and the Black March, so this trope gets subverted. It's better that way, since the cleaver broke very quickly.

Justified in Homestuck with John. He wasn't expecting to go on an adventure, so all he has is a mundane claw hammer, of the kind for typical projects such as fence repair.

Western Animation

In The Fairly Oddparents "Wishology" trilogy, Timmy is told he has to fight The Darkness and sent on his way... with nothing, not even his fairies, to help him. He also loses everything at the beginning of the next two parts, forcing him to start over.

What A Cartoon! Show: In "Gramps", a grandfather tells his grandchildren a tale of how he supposedly saved the world from an alien invasion. The President asked for his help and told him to choose between door number 1 or door number 2. Had he chosen door number one, he'd have received several big weapons but he chose door number 2 and received a mule.

Real Life

In Iraq, American troops have had to resort to "hillbilly armor". For the uninformed, that's putting sheet metal and other scraps on your Humvee as armour kits. These kinds of kludges are not uncommon in most militaries; the greatest problem affecting almost any armed force in history has been logistics and supplies. For example, Generation Kill points out that when the United States Marine Corps was invading Iraq in '03, they were issued MOPPs in forest green camouflage.

Hillbilly armour has its roots in WW2: British and American tankers, discovering how inadequate their vehicles were, tries to up-armor their tanks in anyway, including using things like steel tracks, concretes, sandbags, netting, and even wood. Patton, disliking the practice due to his ordnance officers convincing him otherwise after testing, heavily disapproves of the practice, and the Third Army instead came up with stripping armour plate off wrecks of any nationality and welding it to their own vehicles. It was distinguished with the official-sounding name appliqué armour and was adopted by several other US Armored Groups. German armour was especially favoured for this purpose and many wrecked Panthers and Tigers were stripped down to the frame.note Another reason why so few survived the war to be reconditioned for museums

The British Army had similar problems, as most of their desert pattern equipment had been allocated to Afghanistan. A lot of troops ended up with jungle-pattern fatigues, which were slightly better than nothing as they were at least intended for a hot climate.

The Canadian Army had even more issues even before Iraq, but that's because before 9/11 the Canadian Army didn't have desert fatigues.

The first half of WWI was another example for Canada given their initial equipment, such as rifles that got easily jammed with mud, disassembled when fired, wore boots with such poor stitching that they fell apart with the slightest wear, and a shovel designed with a hole in it. Their early reputation as Stosstruppen, assault troops, partly evolved from a lack of functional equipment for an ordinary firefight.

To clarify, unlike the Imperial Storm Troopers from Star Wars, during 1916-17 the Canadian and Australian Corps acquired truly formidable reputations. This was mostly attributable to their determination to overcome their previous logistical failings and freedom to attempt new solutions to them.

This was actually common up until the advent of standing armies. Many medieval or Roman era soldiers were expected to provide their own equipment, especially horses. In most cases it hardly fits the trope, as knights were expected to pay all military expenses of themselves and their retainers, but it was part of the feudal contract. Not to mention that Roman equites and medieval knight were usually quite resourceful and more than often THEY were the authority responsible for adequate equipment, responsibility which was later transferred to centralized government.

The term "Black Knight" actually comes from the practice of unbound knights (i.e. no fief to support themselves) covering their armor with pitch to prevent rust and generally cut down on maintenance.

The Confederacy was plagued by logistics problems throughout the war. When it started they had no capability to manufacture artillery (and when they developed it the results were sub-standard and inaccurate), their rail system was badly placed to move troops through the interior of the country, and for some reason they had a chronic shoe shortage for basically the entire war.

Some Confederate re-enactors like to think this was planned, claiming that since the high (c.50%) import tariffs on manufactured goods - like machine parts - kept the South dependent on the North for building up its industry and supplying it with factory-produced consumer and other goods. This is true, insofar as it really was a side-effect of the US' longstanding protectionist economic policies.

In World War II, the United States built great numbers of the FP-45 Liberator, a pistol whose main building material was stamped cheapness. The idea was to parachute them in large quantities into cities where significant resistance presence could be amassed, so long as the resistance members could be given something to fight with besides sticks and stones. The FP-45 was a shoddy weapon: imprecise, low-powered and fiddly and time-consuming to reload, its sole purpose was to allow otherwise-unarmed groups of civilians-turned-guerrillas to acquire weapons - by ambushing squads of Axis troops, using 'Liberators' to shoot them from a couple of paces' range or less, and then stealing their (proper, actually useful in pitched combat) weapons. They even had little "Bazooka Joe"-style comic instructions directing the user to sneak in close, put the single round in Fritz' head, then discard the glorified zip gun and help themselves to his weapon.

The .45 ACP round it used made it effective enough in terms of stopping power. As weapons historian Ian Hogg pointed out, it had to be - if that one shot (which had to be made at arm's length or so because of the gun's inaccuracy) missed, you were twelve different kinds of screwed.

Its successor the Deer gun, a similarly crappy weapon chambered in 9mm, was to be used the same way in Vietnam.

Escapees from behind the Berlin Wall built a fantastic array of escape vehicles with virtually no money or resources. Of special note are a homemade tank, and a hot air balloon.

Virtually any escapee from a POW camp has had to face this.

A problem for the Italian Army in both World Wars, even if in different ways:

Italy started World War I with insufficient numbers of everything, and especially machine guns, due a combination of political interference and incompetence, the first competent commander-in-chief in a long time, Alberto Pollio, having to face serious interference due his political leanings (being favorable to the Triple Alliance in a political climate favoring ditching Germany and the Arch-Enemy Austria-Hungary for the other side) and organize the conquest of Libya before his highly suspicious death in 1914, Pollio's successor Cadorna having to start from scratch as he was his political opponent and couldn't take advantage of his predecessor's connections, and a beyond stupid political attitude about the acquisition of machine guns.note After buying an initial batch of Vickers, Italy resolved to use a national design, and obtained the effective Perino machine gun... Whose acquisition was stopped at 150 units due a combination of a heavy tripod (a problem that the inventor himself provided to solve with a new lighter tripod) and the head of the commission that was to decide if continue production being the inventor of the competing but inferior FIAT 1914 machine gun. As the FIAT machine gun was crap, Pollio and his successor Cadorna resolved to buy more Vickers... That were never delivered, even if the ministry paid them in advance, due the start of the war and Italy being nominally allied with Britain's enemies. Hence the adoption of the FIAT machine gun, much to Cadorna's consternation as he had no idea the weight issues of the Perino had been solved and the others were fabrications. The problems were mostly solved by 1917, in time to contribute to Italy's successful defense of the Grappa Massif after the Austro-Hungarian breakthrough at Caporetto, and completely solved with American help by the summer.

By the time World War II started, Italy was theoretically well-equipped... Except the government had learned all the wrong lessons from the conflicts in the 30s and thus gave the troops inadequate equipment (most notably, the Italian Navy had no carriers even in presence of the technical ability to build and equip them and the existence of a capable torpedo bomber design, and Italy's main fighter design was a biplane), and, as the war was expected to start in 1942 at the earliest, the country was caught before it could accumulate adequate reserves of primary resources and produce the few good equipment in the necessary amounts (as an example among many, Italy was switching to a better infantry cartridge, for which they even had a semiautomatic rifle, but with the war starting three years early production of the new cartridge and the rechambered Carcano rifles was stopped due insufficient reserves preventing an immediate switch and possibly causing logistic complications Italy could not deal with, and production of the semiautomatic rifle had to be postponed to 1943 due difficulties in adapting it to the old round).

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